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Wednesday, June 21, 2017

Notes on a vegan cherry pie

June 18, 2017

My Twin Peaks cherry pie was so unforgettably good that only a month later I rolled up my sleeves to try making a vegan version. There's just one ingredient that needs substitution: butter. Following discussion on our facebook page, I replaced the butter with the same weight of Nuttelex and set my food processor a-whirring. It melded with the flour, forming a dough without need of any of the water listed as the final ingredient.

Then came the tough part. This vegan crust was easy to roll but impossible to pick up without extensive tearing. I rolled it twice, cursed the heavens a hundred times, and patched it up as best I could. Forming the lattice wasn't much better, with all of my pastry ribbons breaking in one, if not three, spots. For all that angst, my pie was a flawed beauty, just as sweet and juicy and sour and crumbly as the original. (If anything it was even more Twin Peaks-appropriate, with the filling gorily spilling from one side.)

So, what to do from here? Well, in the first instance we dolloped coconut yoghurt on the pie and shared it proudly with friends. A little later I pulled out my vegan pastry reference to compare recipes and reflect. It's possible that I was just rolling my small volume of dough too thin, and likely that my ratio of flour, fat and water was out of whack. Either way, I think the next iteration needs more flour (say, half-to-one cup) and whatever iced water is needed to form a dough. Hopefully this extended note to self will lead to an equally tasty but less fraught vegan cherry pie in... well, maybe one more month.

10 comments:

It looks great despite your struggles! I always roll out pastry between two sheets of cling wrap or baking paper, following my mum's example. It keeps from dusting everything with flour, but also useful for picking up the pastry and moving it to the pie plate.

It looks great despite your struggles! I always roll out pastry between two sheets of cling wrap or baking paper, following my mum's example. It keeps from dusting everything with flour, but also useful for picking up the pastry and moving it to the pie plate.

Nuttelex always seems to create a softer, more fragile pastry. Freezing it can help when rolling it out (but only slightly). A better bet might be swap it out for a sturdier vegan fat like coconut oil or even an olive oil

Update on a second vegan crust: I added an extra half-cup of flour and for the fat, I used half Nuttelex and half coconut oil by weight. The coconut oil distributed itself a bit unevenly in the food processor but ultimately the dough rolled quite well. I decided not to make a lattice with my flimsy pastry and instead made biscuit-cutter polka dots. This pie was tasty, less stressful and there was leftover dough to make almost an entire second pie.